Pham Tuan made his eight-day mission aboard the Intercosmos 37 rocket of Cold War ally the Soviet Union in what the English-language Vietnam News hailed as the "nation's historic foray into space."

Tuan, who was joined by Russian co-pilot Vasilevich Gorebasko to mark the anniversary, told the paper the lift-off remained the "greatest day in my life."

"As everybody watched us enter the spacecraft at Baikonur Cosmodrome (in what is now Kazakhstan), I felt almost as if time was standing still. I grew more and more anxious as I listened to the countdown even though I had been training for that moment," Tuan recalled.

"Suddenly we and everything in the capsule were thrown into a weightless environment."

Tuan's 1980 space mission was a propaganda coup for Vietnam in the economic dark days of post-war reconstruction and the cosmonaut remembered that he took a veritable suitcase of communist icons with him into space.

"I took several national flags, national emblems, portraits of Uncle Ho (wartime communist leader Ho Chi Minh), his national independence proclamation, his testament, a small pack of soil from Ba Dinh Square (where Ho's embalmed body still lies in state) and many other badges."

Now a lieutenant general and deputy head of Vietnam's defence industry, Tuan's space mission won him the highest accolades of the former Eastern bloc, including Hero of the Soviet Union, but it was not his first claim to a place in the communist hall of fame.

During Washington's controversial Chistmas 1972 bombing campaign against north Vietnam's cities, he became the first Vietnamese fighter pilot to shoot down a giant B-52 "Flying Fortess" bomber.

"When some people find out that I have made history twice, they come to visit me especially to see if there is anything strange about me," Tuan joked.

The humble background of Vietnam's first cosmonaut is the stuff propagandists' dreams are made of -- he was only the second child from his village in the impoverished northern province of Thai Binh to go to secondary school, Vietnam News said.

"Even as a young boy he often dreamt of flying as he worked with his siblings herding buffalo and working in the fields," the paper said.

"Among his greatest joys then was to watch kites soar -- he still preserves the kites that his mother gave him."

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SPACE HISTORY
Marking Time In Our Journey Into Space
by Ivan Briscoe
Paris (AFP) July 21, 2000 - The heroic age of space exploration is over. Recent years have brought a slow, steady build-up in our understanding of the universe. But as man stares at the stars and wonders about the century ahead, he is faced, not with with fewer questions but more.